Plekhanov House, the National Library of Russia department, St. Petersburg (Web)

Time: 28.-29.05.2021
Venue: St. Petersburg
Proposals by: 31.03.2021

This symposium is organized in cooperation between the Plekhanov House, the National Library of Russia department (St. Petersburg), the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS), University of Bremen and the Moscow Branch of The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Berlin) to celebrate Rosa Luxemburg’s 150th anniversary. It aims at critically discussing Rosa Luxemburg as well as her associates and adherents’ historical, anti-imperialist and political writings in the context of theory of imperialism with regard to questions of anti-imperial and post-/de-colonial studies.

At the turn of the 20th century Rosa Luxemburg positioned herself as a revolutionary and against the revision of Marxist principles within social democracy. She resolutely opposed parliamentarism as well as tendencies of chauvinism and militarism inside the social-democratic worker’s movement.

While political writings such as “Social Reform or Revolution?” (1899) emphasize class struggle as a Marxist principle, “Militarism, War and the Working Class” (1914) expresses an internationalist stance against imperialist wars. In prison Rosa Luxemburg wrote “The Crisis of Social Democracy” (1916), which also circulated under the title “Junius Brochure”. A crisis within the European Marxist labour movement led to the split of Marxist movements (Social Democrats vs. Communists) in 1919 as a result of the first imperialist World War – taking place mainly on European(-controlled), Russian and Ottoman territories. As an internationalist Rosa Luxemburg positioned herself not only on questions of war and peace within Europe, but also with regard to the standpoint of European Marxists towards the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistances in Asia, Africa and the Americas. In 1906, a majority of German Social Democrats voted in Parliament for the further financial support of German colonial rule in southern Africa, where the genocide of the Hereros and Nama was continuing as survivors of General von Trotha’s killing policy were imprisoned in concentration camps. Such racist politics developed into the system of Apartheid. Read more and source (Web).